Armand Vallin Feigenbaum

Armand Vallin Feigenbaum (born 1922) is an American quality control expert and businessman. He devised the concept of Total Quality Control, later known as Total Quality Management (TQM). Feigenbaum began his career with GE in 1937 as an apprentice toolmaker and management intern with the turbine, engine and transformer group. His coursework focused on mathematics, statistics, engineering and economics. Feigenbaum received a bachelor's degree from Union College, and his master's degree and Ph.D. from MIT. He was Director of Manufacturing Operations at General Electric (1958-1968), and President and CEO of General Systems Company of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, an engineering firm that designs and installs operational systems. During World War II, Feigenbaum supported the war effort as an aircraft engine designer. When the German air force destroyed the Rolls-Royce engine plant in Coventry, United Kingdom, the U.S. Air Force immediately assigned the design and development of all allied aircraft engines to GE. Because the quality of these engines was so essential to the war effort, Feigenbaum was asked to establish GEs first quality control engineering unit. In 1943, he was transferred to GEs 45,000 -employee Schenectady Works plant in New York to help design engines for the P-38 and P-47 fighters and related naval aircraft. Later that year, he was named manager of quality control for the entire site, which served as the hub of GEs military effort and supported the building of products as diverse as submarines, B-29 bombers and the Vulcan cannon. This was a significant responsibility for the 23-year-old Feigenbaum and evidence of managements high regard for his work. Following the war, he progressed through a series of increasingly responsible line management jobs while working on his graduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Once he earned his doctorate, he was transferred to Cincinnati as assistant general manager for GEs aircraft engine business, which built the jet engines used in the F-90 Shooting Star fighter during the Korean War. As part of his collateral responsibilities as a GE manager, Feigenbaum was the champion for the management development program and leader of the team that established the GE Ortonville Learning Center in New York. He was subsequently promoted to GEs corporate headquarters in New York City where he flourished as the executive champion for quality. As GEs global quality focus expanded, Feigenbaum made many international contacts w ith leading businesses in Europe and Japan. He worked with the local organizations in each country where GE had a plant to strengthen their knowledge and understanding of total quality by helping them install better quality control practices based on GEs practical experience. GEs international influence was significant because it came from the strength of demonstrated performance, not pure theory. Companies could see the idea of total quality in action at their local GE facilities. The extended assistance provided to this global network of GE business partners allowed them to provide assistance to their nations respective quality societies. In 1968, after 25 years of applying quality techniques at GE, Feigenbaum established General Systems Co. (GSC) to conduct further research on technology management and expand the outreach of his ideas to other organizations. GSC was one of the first engineering organizations dedicated to business improvement through use of quality management and statistics methods. Feigenbaum wrote several books and served as President of the American Society for Quality (19611963). He has spent a great deal of time abroad in connection with this work. His globetrotting reflects his long-standing international concerns; over the years he has been a leading voice of the international view in the field of quality control and quality management. "The belief that quality travels under an exclusive foreign passport is a myth," Feigenbaum said.

Feigenbaum was the founding chairman of the board of the International Academy for Quality, which brought together leaders of the European Organization for Quality, the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers, and ASQ. Prior to assuming his responsibilities at General Systems Co., Feigenbaum was the manager of worldwide manufacturing operations and quality control for the General Electric Co. Feigenbaum is recognized as an innovator in the area of quality cost management. His was the first text to characterize quality costs as the costs of prevention, appraisal, and internal and external failure. Along with Deming and Juran, he established the intellectual framework for quality as a discipline worthy of top managements attention. Feigenbaum served a pivotal role in the history of the quality movement. Along with Deming and Juran, he established the intellectual framework for quality as a discipline worthy of top managements attention. While the quality movement had previously focused on production processes and product quality using basic statistical tools and analysis methods, the extension of quality into all areas of business, including the service and public sectors, is Feigenbaums lasting contribution. The uniqueness of his contribution lies in the disciplined engineering approach he brought to the development of a systematic system of quality thought. Deming, a statistician, emphasized statistical thinking as the foundation for profound knowledge, and Juran, trained as a lawyer, favored a model that pursued financial and management frameworks. Feigenbaum, however, developed the pragmatic engineering approach that established total quality the breakthrough conceptual framework that has dominated the business worlds approach to delivering quality results for the last 50 years. Most impressive, Feigenbaum developed his ideas before he turned 30 years old and was able to sustain the direction of these pursuits and extend them to ensure a mature practice that he shepherded into global acceptance.

CONTRIBUTION
Armand Feigenbaum is the originator of Total Quality Control. He sees quality control as a business method rather than technically, and believes that quality has become the single most important force leading to organizational success and growth. Over the years he has refined his business theories to demonstrate the economic relationships whereby quality drives commercial performance. The first edition of his book Total Quality Control was completed whilst he was still a doctoral student at MIT. Feigenbaum's ideas are contained in his now famous book Total Quality Control, first published in 1951 under the title Quality Control: Principles, Practice, and Administration, and based on his earlier articles and program installations in the field. The book has been translated into more than a score of languages, including Japanese, Chinese, French, and Spanish. In his book Quality Control: Principles, Practices and Administration, Feigenbaum strove to move away from the then primary concern with technical methods of quality control, to quality control as a business method. Thus he emphasized the administrative viewpoint and considered human relations as a basic issue in quality control activities. Individual methods, such as statistics or preventive maintenance, are seen as only segments of a comprehensive quality control programme. His contributions to the quality body of knowledge include: "Total quality control is an effective system for integrating the quality development, quality maintenance, and quality improvement efforts of the various groups in an organization so as to enable production and service at the most economical levels which allow full customer satisfaction." The concept of a "hidden" plant: the idea that so much extra work is performed in correcting mistakes that there is effectively a hidden plant within any factory. Accountability for quality: Because quality is everybody's job, it may become nobody's job: the idea that quality must be actively managed and have visibility at the highest levels of management. Feigenbaums study of the macroeconomic impact of quality improvement has demonstrated a lag between the initiations of total quality improvement programs within a nations leading companies and the observed economic effects throughout general business. For example, quality was introduced in Japan in the 1950s, but its economy didnt flower until the 1970s. Similarly, the United States began using quality in the early 1980s but didnt see economic success until the 1990s. The new 40th Anniversary edition of Dr A V Feigenbaum's book, Total Quality Control, now further defines TQC for the 1990s in the form of ten crucial benchmarks for total quality success. These are that: Quality is a company-wide process. Quality is what the customer says it is. Quality and cost are a sum, not a difference. Quality requires both individual and team zealotry. Quality is a way of managing. Quality and innovation are mutually dependent. Quality is an ethic. Quality requires continuous improvement. Quality is the most cost-effective, least capital-intensive route to productivity. Quality is implemented with a total system connected with customers and suppliers.

These are the ten benchmarks for total quality in the 1990s. They make quality a way of totally focusing the company on the customer - whether it be the end user or the man or woman at the next work station or next desk. Most importantly, they provide the company with foundation points for successful implementation of its international quality leadership.

The Strengths and Weaknesses of Feigenbaum

Provides a total approach to quality control Places the emphasis on the importance of management Includes socio-technical thinking. Participation by all staff is promoted Does not discriminate between different kinds of quality context. Does not bring together the different management theories into one coherent whole.

Quality control
Quality control itself is defined as: 'An effective system for co-ordinating the quality maintenance and quality improvement efforts of the various groups in an organization so as to enable production at the most economical levels which allow for full customer satisfaction.' Armand Feigenbaum stresses that quality does not mean best but best for the customer use and selling price. The word control in quality control represents a management tool with 4 steps: 1. Setting quality standards 2. Appraising conformance to these standards. 3. Acting when standards are exceeded. 4. Planning for improvements in the standards. Quality control is seen as entering into all phases of the industrial production process, from customer specification and sale through design, engineering and assembly, and ending with shipment of product to a customer who is happy with it. Effective control over the factors affecting product quality is regarded as requiring controls at all important stages of the production process. These controls or jobs of quality control can be classified as: New-design control Incoming material control Product control Special process studies.

Misconception in quality control According to Feigenbaum, many organizations commit the blunder of viewing statistical tools as a means to control quality. However, he suggested that statistical tools make up only a small percentage of the quality control program. In short, statistical tools and techniques are a subset of the main quality control system. Quality is seen as having become the single most important force leading to organisational success and company growth in national and international markets. Further, it is argued that: Quality is in its essence a way of managing the organization and that, like finance and marketing, quality has now become an essential element of modern management. Thus a Total Quality System is defined as: The agreed company-wide and plant wide operating work structure, documented in effective, integrated technical and managerial procedures, for guiding the co-ordinate actions of the people, the machines and the information of the company and plant in the best and most practical ways to assure customer quality satisfaction and economical costs of quality. Operating quality costs are divided into: Prevention costs including quality planning. Appraisal costs including inspection. Internal failure costs including scrap and rework. External failure costs including warranty costs, complaints etc.

 Reductions in operating quality costs result from setting up a total quality system for two reasons: Lack of existing effective customer-orientated customer standards may mean current quality of products is not optimal given use Expenditure on prevention costs can lead to a severalfold reduction in internal and external failure costs.

Notable definitions
While there is no generally-accepted definition of TQM, several notable organizations have attempted to define it. These include: United States Department of Defense (1988) Total Quality Management (TQM) in the Department of Defense is a strategy for continuously improving performance at every level, and in all areas of responsibility. It combines fundamental management techniques, existing improvement efforts, and specialized technical tools under a disciplined structure focused on continuously improving all processes. Improved performance is directed at satisfying such broad goals as cost, quality, schedule, and mission need and suitability. Increasing user satisfaction is the overriding objective. British Standards Institution standard BS 7850-1:1992 "A management philosophy and company practices that aim to harness the human and material resources of an organization in the most effective way to achieve the objectives of the organization International Organization for Standardization standard ISO 8402:1994 "A management approach of an organization centered on quality, based on the participation of all its members and aiming at long term success through customer satisfaction and benefits to all members of the organization and society. The American Society for Quality "A term first used to describe a management approach to quality improvement. Since then, TQM has taken on many meanings. Simply put, it is a management approach to long-term success through customer satisfaction. TQM is based on all members of an organization participating in improving processes, products, services and the culture in which they work. The methods for implementing this approach are found in the teachings of such quality leaders as Philip B. Crosby, W. Edwards Deming, Armand V. Feigenbaum, Kaoru Ishikawa and Joseph M. Juran The Chartered Quality Institute "TQM is a philosophy for managing an organisation in a way which enables it to meet stakeholder needs and expectations efficiently and effectively, without compromising ethical values.

AWARDS
He was the first recipient of ASQ's Lancaster Award, which was established to recognize exceptional leadership on the international scene in promoting quality. His citation for the award recognizes "his outstanding contributions toward international cooperation in quality control through his development and sharing of knowledge and experience around the world, and for his leadership in the International Academy for Quality." ASQ 1965 Edwards Medal in recognition of "his origination and implementation of basic foundations for modern quality control" National Security Industrial Association Award of Merit Member of the Advisory Group of the U.S. Army Chairman of a system-wide evaluation of quality assurance activities of the Army Material Command Consultant with the Industrial College of the Armed Forces Union College Founders Medal Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Life member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Life member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineer

A Quality Role Model

Feigenbaum has been a role model for managerial innovation and its implementation. He could be perceived as a quality guru, except that label creates too distant an image of his activities over the past 50 years. Feigenbaum has been much more than an academic; he has served as an executive player and coach. He coached business leaders in the fine points of engineering their businesses as coherent systems. He also acted to deploy his message through a pragmatic technology transfer of lessons learned and best practices to the implementation level to drive improvement into work processes at the frontline of operations. Feigenbaum is not a pontificator on the philosophical principles of quality. Instead, he aims to understand the underlying relationships among operating principles and systematizes this knowledge

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://asq.org/about-asq/who-we-are/bio_feigen.html http://qualityandproductivityforum.blogspot.in/2012/09/armand-v-feigenbaum.html http://tenstep.fr/01_Publique/90.3_EspaceDeLaQualite/Anglais/700ArmandVFeigenbaum.pdf http://mitsloan.mit.edu/alumni/pdf/Winter08-Feigenbaum.pdf http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_Quality_Management https://ujdigispace.uj.ac.za/bitstream/handle/10210/2974/A%20%20AlSaket%20(TQM%20Dissertation).pdf?sequence=1